Saturday, November 30, 2013

As a result of my studies, I have come to believe that every plant, animal, insect, and fish are proofs for God in and of themselves. There are hundreds of thousands of such proofs everywhere you look for “he who has eyes to see and ears to hear.”Pick any one that you like and research it extensively. You can go on and on and on being more and more astounded. Each is so marvelous that the only possible conclusion, if you are willing to accept it, is that it was designed by a super intelligent source.

Let’s talk about ants for a while…tiny creatures with a brain no bigger than a pinhead. There are over 12,500 cataloged species of ants, with estimates of perhaps 22,000 in existence.[1] Evolutionists have their creation story for how all these different ants came into being. The story always starts with knowing the conclusion and figuring out the path of how blind and accidental processes might have arrived at that end. It’s pure fiction. When you analyze each supposed step with logical questions, you’ll have to believe in miracles to accept that it could really have happened.There isn’t any real proof that can be observed, so in the end you have to decide what story you are going to believe in. Did all of these astounding capabilities of ants just come about accidentally? Or is there a God behind it? Either way, you are a still just a believer. There is only faith.Here is a quote that shows what I mean. In the considered opinion of biologist Jochen Zeil of the Australian National University“I think that every animal we look at [including the ant] is a more competent, more robust, more flexible, more miniaturized and a more energy-, material-, sensor-, and computation-efficient agent than anything we have ever built.” [2]I would agree with him, but his conclusion is different than mine. He thinks that it all happened by accident and he chooses to believe in evolution. His faith is that there was no invisible God behind it. Ants are everywhere in the world. Have you ever taken the time to watch them? Probably you studied them in school somewhere and you were very impressed at what they can do. A functioning colony of ants may contain millions and millions of ants and some colonies may be as big as a house. Scientists have poured cement into ant colonies and then dug them out to see what they look like (see pictures below).

How big in size is an ant brain do you think? But amazing things are going on inside there. Researchers have concluded they are doing math as complicated as the programmers who built the Internet so that billions of tiny packets of information run smoothly along channels and through nodes and switches to get to their final destinations. Here is a quote about ant math and food supplies: “The algorithm relates at least three critical variables: the rate of outgoing foragers, the amount that the rate increases with each returning ant, and the amount that the rate decreases with each outgoing ant. Researchers discovered that this ant algorithm closely matches the one that programmers wrote to regulate Internet traffic. The algorithm uses two formulae:

[3]

Here is another type of math. Researchers Chris Reid and Associate Professor Madeleine Beekman experimented with ants and changeable mazes.[4] They discovered that ants can adapt well enough to create an optimal solution to a maze, something few computer programs can do.This was called the “towers of Hanoi” puzzle. [5] “The game involves transferring disks of tapering size from one of three stacks to another without placing a larger disk on top of a smaller one. For the ants, though, researchers transposed the different stacking options onto a maze of hexagons, where the shortest route to food corresponded to the best solution to the puzzle. Of course, the ants solved it. They even reworked new solutions to overcome blocked tunnels. In addition, the pioneer ants that solved the puzzles somehow explained the correct route to their relatives.”[6]

Ant colonies of necessity have incredible systems to function as they do with effectiveness and efficiency. All the food coming in and being stored and used up needs to be accounted for, measured constantly, and maintained. There are systems for heating and cooling the food, systems for disposal of wastes, systems for hygiene and disposal of dead ants, systems for caring for eggs and the newborn, systems for protection and survival in case of floods or invasions. Here is a simplified diagram to illustrate the point above:

(See diagram above) “An ant colony has several entrances (A), leading to a variety of subterranean chambers. Each chamber has a specific use. Some are for food storage (B). The queen has her own room (D). In another chamber workers tend unhatched eggs (C). A deeper room serves as a nursery for larvae and cocoons (F). In the replete gallery (G) are the worker ants whose expanded abdomens contain surplus food for the colony. In another room (E), worker ants are digging a new chamber.”[7]Scientists believe ants have a sophisticated guidance system like GPS and also that they are able to count and remember how many steps they have taken away from the nest so that they can return. They can also communicate through a number of different chemical signals to other ants.“Distances travelled are measured using an internal pedometer that keeps count of the steps taken and also by evaluating the movement of objects in their visual field (optical flow). Directions are measured using the position of the sun. They integrate this information to find the shortest route back to their nest. Like all ants, they can also make use of visual landmarks when available as well as olfactory and tactile cues to navigate. Some species of ant are able to use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation. The compound eyes of ants have specialized cells that detect polarized light from the Sun, which is used to determine direction. These polarization detectors are sensitive in the ultraviolet region of the light spectrum.”[8]Just think about how complicated the ant eye mechanism must be to accomplish what it does. Please read about The Eye in my previous proof for God. But the ant uses other really complicated systems as well like smell and touch and muscles all integrated into their tiny brains. Ants have been observed to be moving in pairs where one seems to be teaching the other one. I think one should conclude that they are passing on information which strongly indicates intelligence rather than accidental origins.Evolution hypothesizes that the process of natural selection is at work. This normally involves a male and a female parent. Ant mating and reproduction can be very different from that. Here is a statement from Wikipedia: “A wide range of reproductive strategies have been noted in ant species. Females of many species are known to be capable of reproducing asexually through thelytokous parthenogenesis and one species, Mycocepurus smithii, is known to be all-female.”[9]Also another statement from Wikipedia showing more issues for evolutionists:“The life of an ant starts from an egg. If the egg is fertilized, the progeny will be female (diploid); if not, it will be male (haploid). Ants develop by complete metamorphosis with the larva stages passing through a pupal stage before emerging as an adult. The larva is largely immobile and is fed and cared for byworkers.”[10]If males are “haploid” it means they only have 1 set of chromosomes, not two to offer for Natural Selection to work. Secondly, metamorphosis could never be a process that could have resulted from evolution (see my blog article on that). Thirdly, asexual reproduction also does not offer a chance for Natural Selection to function. Each colony has several different types of ants within the same species, e.g. workers/drones, soldiers, queen, and males. Evolution cannot account for how they accidentally came to exist and then could continue to be produced by the observable ways they are. Typically the food they receive or chemicals around them determine what type of ant they become. Scientists don’t really know that much about this subject.Some ants in a colony can fly, but others cannot. How can that be explained adequately by accidents?

Various ant species build amazing things besides nests. Some make bridges and some can make rafts. Tell me no intelligence was involved in an elaborate construction, it was all by accident, and then let me smile condescendingly. “Solenopsis invicta, a common species of fire ant, originates from the rain forests of Brazil, where heavy precipitation can cause flooding to occur up to twice daily. In order to stick together as a colony during these deluges, the fire ants hook their legs and mouths together to create a living, breathing waterproof material that floats for hours, or even weeks, if necessary, until floods subside.”[11]In conclusion, there are thousands of different species of ants with incredibly complex systems of organization on a massive scale. It takes a lot of faith in chance and denial of intelligence to believe all this evolved by chance. Let me also remind you that there are over 20,000 known species of bees, 100,000 species of wasps, and 4,000 species of termites. All of these live in highly developed colonies as well. There must be God.________________________________________1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant2. Gross, M. 2012. How ants find their way. Current Biology. 22 (16): R618.3. Prabhakar, B., K. N. Dektar, and D. M. Gordon. 2012. The Regulation of Ant Colony Foraging Activity without Spatial Information. PLoS Computational Biology. 8 (8): e1002670.4. News story: http://sydney.edu.au/news/sobs/1699.html?newsstoryid=6164 The result was exactly as predicted: the ants quickly established pheromone trails along the shortest path. But then we blocked the shortest paths, thus forcing the ants to find an alternative solution. As explained above, conventional wisdom dictates that the ants would not be able to adapt and would continue following their original trail that now leads nowhere.Contrary to predictions, Argentine ants rapidly found the alternative shortest path, showing that they have the ability to adapt to sudden changes in their environment. But the speed with which they adapt depends on whether or not they had prior experience with the maze: colonies that had explored the maze hours before food was introduced, found the alternative solution quicker than colonies without such pre-exposure. This is a puzzling result, as the time between exploring the maze and the need to find an alternative solution when the original path is blocked, was at least 1 hour.5. Reid, C. R., D. J. T. Sumpter and M. Beekman. 2011. Optimisation in a natural system: Argentine ants solve the Towers of Hanoi. Journal of Experimental Biology. 214 (1): 50-58.6. Insect Arithmetic--Pure Genius! by Frank Sherwin, M.A., & Brian Thomas, M.S. http://www.icr.org/article/7536/7. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-144467/An-ant-colony-has-several-entrances-leading-to-a-variety8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant 11. http://www.nbcnews.com/science/bizarre-fire-ants-lock-together-form-big-rafts-survive-floods-2D11660482

Saturday, November 9, 2013

The eye is a wonderful proof for God. The more you know about it, the more impossible it could come into existence without God, a supremely intelligent being, having created it. Just follow with me some of what it does and how it does it. This is going to be my longest article because there is so much information and research done on the eye and it is so astounding. I have read maybe 100 articles about the eye and this post is hardly going to scratch the surface of the awesomeness of all the different types and abilities of the eyes in creation. I’m not even going to cover many of the amazing parts. I hope you can read to the end of this. I tried to make every paragraph succinct and educational.

The human eye can detect 7 to 10 million colors. That’s more than any machine known to man. All the colors we see are all within only 1.5% of the entire light spectrum.[1] By such an amazing accident (for evolutionists) or incredible design (for religious people) our eyes see exactly the wavelengths of light where the color is and not the others. Those colors that we are able to see happen to be truly marvelous.

Photoreceptor cells in our eyes can catch photons of light and send a signal to the brain which interprets what color it is and distinguishes various objects. Evolutionists talk about some “original” light sensitive cell like it was simple. Just read about “Signal Transduction in the eye” [2] and how receptors are chemically turned on and off instantaneously if you want to get an idea of how tremendously complicated it is to activate a photoreceptor.Evolutionists also never talk about all the millions of colors. Did photoreceptors recognize just one color in the beginning and then “gradually over time” accidentally become able to tell the difference in all the millions of colors. That’s a hard one to believe because the ability to see any color at all is extremely complicated. [3]Even if some first creature developed a photo receptor cell, so what? It would be pointless for survival unless it was somehow connected to a brain that was also connected to a muscle system to provide movement. Evolutionists talk about the eye evolving to help the creature escape predators. Excuse me. If this is supposed to be the first eye to develop, then there are no predators with eyes yet. What are they escaping from? Also, even having a photo receptor cell is not valuable for survival unless there is some way to tell which direction the danger is coming from so you can escape in the other direction. There are way too many logical holes in these evolutionist faith statements. Their faith in evolution is blind. They don’t even ask simple questions.

The retina of the human eye is made up of an average of 120 million rods and 6 million cones, each with their own neuron that carries messages to the brain. (Birds have 10 times that number.) The rods see in black and white for night vision and the cones see all the different colors. There are 3 types of cones that perceive different wave lengths. The retina is further divided into the macula, a small central area giving central vision, and the fovea, a small depression at the center of the macula which gives the clearest vision. In the fovea the blood vessels, nerves, and ganglion cells are all displaced for better vision. The area in the macula is 100 times more sensitive than the rest of the retina.

Does Natural Selection really explain how this could have developed gradually step by step with each step over sequential generations being better able to survive and pass on its genes? It would take millions of generations. There’s not enough time. Humans all have eyes the same, so all 7 billion of us and all humans in history must have descended from an original ancestral couple had eyes like we all have now. And eyes have never evolved since. And not one of all the millions of supposedly intermediate stages of eye is still around. Not one older stage ever shows up in random individuals either. Every other kind of eye or intermediate stage has died out completely.All eyes have a lens made out of a transparent protein substance found nowhere else in the body. This lens must necessarily be formed out of a flexible substance and it must have muscles to change its shape so it can alter the path of the incoming light and constantly re-focus it on receptor cells. If you can’t focus the light, you can’t see anything. There are 12 muscles on the outside that move the eyeball around in the socket, including one that uses a pulley mechanism to swivel the eye (the Superior Oblique, see diagram). Eye muscles come in pairs to move your eyes up and down, left and right. If the muscles only turned your eyes to the right, they would be stuck there until many generations later when a muscle developed to pull them back left. The same is true if you only had a muscle to pull them up but not one to pull them back down.

Tilt your head and your eyes adjust so you can still see well.

Evolution hypothesizes that blind chance mutations have the amazing ability to come up with these changes so they can be selected for by natural selection. That’s total blind faith. How could the lens material and all those muscles happen accidentally, without any intelligent design at all? One small change at a time will never produce a continuously workable eye.Recent discoveries have revealed that the muscles surrounding your eyes are amazing. They “jitter” at the rate of 30 to 70 microscopic movements per second all day every day. If the muscles did not do this, you would not be able to focus as well because your brain’s programming of the incoming signals removes any unchanging image.[4] These jitter motions come in 3 types, called drifts, tremors, and saccades. The ones named “tremors” move the cornea and retina about 0.001 millimeter (about 1/70th the width of a piece of paper). Our eyes do all this automatically.[5] Here’s a fact you probably learned in grade school, the lens inverts all the images coming through so it hits your retina upside down. Your brain automatically turns it right side up. If your brain didn’t do that, you’d have a hard time escaping from any predators. The brain is taking upside down images from both your eyes, inverting them, and putting them together. Evolutionists don’t talk about that.

Another necessary part of the eye is the iris which opens and closes to let in varying amounts of light. Too much light and you are blinded. You are probably not aware of how much work your iris is doing all day long because it’s totally automatic. That sure is a nice ability to have or you might be blinded or in the dark most of the time.And then there are also your eye lids, some pretty useful pieces of skin with their own sets of muscles. Each eye has over 50 glands in the eye lids for secreting oil for lubricating the eyes.Everybody has tear ducts that come in mirror image sets for each eye. How does something like that happen by accident? Like every other detail of your eyes, you will find your tear ducts are like a miracle if you read up on the research to understand what they do and how they do it. Not only do you cry when something gets in your eye, but your tear ducts also work when you are emotionally moved. How do evolutionists explain that?

Another essential ingredient to being able to see is the optic nerve. This statement is from Wikipedia: “Each human optic nerve contains between 770,000 and 1.7 million nerve fibers, which are axons of the retinal ganglion cells of one retina. In the fovea, which has high acuity, these ganglion cells connect to as few as 5 photoreceptor cells; in other areas of retina, they connect to many thousand photoreceptors.”[6] On top of everything else that happened by accident for evolutionists, you also have to add the accidental development of an optic nerve which would have no purpose unless there were photoreceptor cells on one end and the brain on the other. Of course, there is an optic nerve coming from each eye, thus doubling the number of nerve fibers to the brain which interprets the signals.Even if the eye developed and then for some reason started sending electrical impulses to the brain, probably the most remarkable achievement of all is how the brain translates those impulses into “seeing” colors and then translating those colors into shapes and giving them meaning?Darwin himself recognized that the unbelievable complexity of the eye was a problem for his theory, but then he went ahead and ignored it and assumed evolution anyway. “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder” [7] The idea of natural selection producing the eye “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” [8] He went ahead and believed in his evolution theory anyway. Today, after all the scientific discoveries since Darwin, I think his comment about “absurd in the highest possible degree” is more applicable to his theory. There are lots of diagrams you can find of the supposed evolution of the eye, but they are pure imagination (emphasis mine). If you read the explanations carefully, you will always discover that they are an hypothesis… in other words complete conjecture. There is absolutely no fossil evidence for these diagrams. The diagrams are always described as “likely”, “probably”, or “possibly”. In other words they are pure speculation and totally from the artist’s imagination. They ASSUME evolution before they even draw the first stage. Evolutionists always talk like it’s the “gospel”. But it’s blind faith.Look at this diagram below. See how they make huge leaps and changes in the design because they know where they want to get to. But all you have to do is use the old “slow and gradual” argument that they themselves espouse and think about the real world. Every single minor change means a significant number of changes in DNA. How many generations need to live and die between the changes in the pictures? Remember these are animals with only partial eyes that have to find a mate somehow. They have to pass the “improvement” to the next generation and not lose it. That means both the male and female have to have it AND it has to pass to all future generations and never get weeded out. If Natural Selection really works, it works both ways. Not only does it improve things, it should also eliminate unnecessary, non-functional parts, or those that are a hindrance.

Even if one eye could evolve, which is an unbelievable stretch, how do you account for two eyes right next to each other. That’s got to be statistically hundreds of times more difficult. Most evolutionists make up an explanation for one eye and then stop. They still have to explain how did we get two so perfectly connected and coordinated eyes working in harmony and also connected into the brain in order to give us parallax vision and 3-dimensional mental images?Evolutionists have two main techniques to try to explain eye evolution. Logically they fall apart because both techniques assume evolution before they start their explanation. This is called circular reasoning, using evolution to prove evolution. The most common is to notice other eye-like structures in nature and assume they were one of the steps in a long process that has never, ever been seen. A helicopter may look like an intermediate step from a car to an airplane, so what? Applying true logic reveals the false assumptions.Just because simple eyes exist and complex eyes also exist in nature, that is no proof that complex eyes evolved from simple eyes. Cars did not evolve from soap box racers or skate boards just because there are design similarities.

Secondly, evolutionists look in the womb and see the eye develop in stages which they call evolutionary stages. They may say that a seed growing is evolution, but it’s not. Why is the growth process in the womb necessarily the explanation of the process that took millions of years? Also, a seed already has the full complement of DNA structure. It’s not evolving, it’s fulfilling instructions which are already there.Evolutionists like to use what I’ll call “magic words”. They sound nice but they are totally unscientific and no respectable scientist uses them. Here are examples that you’ll find all the time: “selective pressures”, tinker, suggest, at some point, scenarios, hypothesizes, diverging, proliferated, arose, favored, modified, emerged, developed, etc. And the biggest one of all is “may have”. Those are not words used by real scientists with solid evidence. Passive, unthinking processes cannot do intelligent things. Evolutionists are really only telling a story that they already believe. They can make it up as they go along whenever there is an objection.Another problem that evolutionist believers have is their so-called tree of life where all species developed from a single cell. Since mammals, fish, birds, insects, amphibians, etc. all have different types of eyes and are on different “branches” of the tree, therefore the evolution faith requires that all the different types of eyes “evolved” independently of each other. The Wikipedia article states that complex eyes have evolved between 50 and 100 separate times in evolution. [9] Imagine of the mathematical odds against that, can you? Evolutionists are forced to believe that eyes not only evolved one time in history but 50 to 100 separate times. To make it even more impossible, almost always the animal developed exactly two of them.

Wikipedia quietly admits that “Since the fossil record, particularly of the Early Cambrian, is so poor, it is difficult to estimate the rate of eye evolution.” The fossil record only shows eyes already developed. “The oldest eye in the fossil record, that of a trilobite, is a very complex faceted compound eye that ‘dates’ back to the Cambrian, conventionally dated about 540 million years ago.”[10] Did you get that, the oldest fossils with eyes (trilobites) already have a fully developed complex faceted compound eye. [11] Another way that I could put it is that there is no fossil record at all to support evolution of the eye. Or, also, you could say that any evolution of the eye is pure speculation.Here is another statement admitting that evolutionists have no idea how it happened. “The curious thing, however, about the evolution of the vertebrate eye is the apparent suddenness of its appearance and the elaboration of its structures in its earliest known stages.”[12] They just DO NOT know where eyes came from or how.Remember, I've only cover some of the amazing aspects of the eye. The eye was awesomely designed, but Evolutionists just won’t accept it.There truly is a God. _____________________________________________[1] Some great fun facts: http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM107Lab/Exp7/Spectroscope/Spectroscope.html[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell[3] Wikipedia: Color Vision. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision[4] http://creation.com/an-eye-for-detail [5] Tom Wagner,, Darwin Vs. the Eye. Sept. 1, 1994[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_nerve.[7] Award-winning science writer Carl Zimmer explains the “creation” of the organ so complex that it baffled even Darwin. The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine. October 9, 2009.[8] Award-winning science writer Carl Zimmer explains the “creation” of the organ so complex that it baffled even Darwin. The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine. October 9, 2009.[9] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye[10] http//creation.com/did-eyes-evolve-by-dawinian-mechanisms [11] Did Eyes Evolve By Darwinian Mechanisms?, Jerry Brergman[12] Duke-Elder, S.S., System of Ophthalmology, Volume 1: The Eye in Evolution. p. 237.

About Me

Welcome to 101 Proofs For God for the "common man" This Blog was inspired by a prayer where I asked God how I could help Him and experienced a deeply lonely heart for His children. Hopefully my inspirations might tweak your thinking about the things all around you in this world.
Each proof should be just short enough for a 1 to 2 minute read.
May God bless you immensely and may you draw closer to Him every day. - Jim Stephens